Lebanon News and World News Live from Beirut

Egypt’s Morsi fails to impress opposition

The concessions offered in Egypt by President Mohammed Morsi have failed to satisfy his opponents. The opposition is still rejecting the upcoming constitutional referendum and is convinced Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood wants to redraw the face of Egypt.

Supporters of President Morsi captured, detained and beat dozens of his political opponents last week, holding them for hours with their hands bound on the pavement outside the presidential palace while pressuring them to confess that they had accepted money to use violence in protests against him.

“It was torment for us,” said Yehia Negm, 42, a former diplomat with a badly bruised face and rope marks on his wrists. He said he was among a group of about 50, including four minors, who were held on the pavement overnight. In front of cameras, “they accused me of being a traitor, or conspiring against the country, of being paid to carry weapons and set fires,” he said in an interview. “I thought I would die.”

Yehia Negm, a former diplomat, was detained and beaten.

To critics of Islamists recalled the tactics of the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, who often saw a conspiracy of “hidden hands” behind his domestic opposition and deployed plainclothes thugs acting outside the law to punish those who challenged him. The difference is that the current enforcers are driven by the self-righteousness of their religious ideology, rather than money.